Yes, it's extremely hard to figure out how what you just said could possibly happen. If it was a ternary system, that means the three stars were in stable orbits. One forms a black hole. If no mass were lost, everything would remain in the same stable orbits. If mass were lost (which is almost certainly the case -- supernovas tend to throw off a lot of mass), then the star that becomes a black hole now has *less* grip on its companions than it did. If it doesn't lose them entirely, they should at least shift into more distant orbits. When a star becomes a black hole, it becomes much LESS likely to gobble up its neighbors. If it didn't gobble them up before it collapsed into a black hole, it almost certainly isn't going to do so afterwards.
You think Apple lowered the price because of competition?
I do.
Apple weren't profiting of people's desires to have DRM free music,
That's false. People were paying more money for the same music. If, as you indicate below, having DRM increases costs, then people were paying more money for something that was cheaper to produce. Either Apple was profiting from people's desires for DRM-free music, or Jobs lied about DRM increasing costs.
Jobs said himself that he is opposed to DRM, and that having DRM creates overhead that increases the cost.
This is true, but doesn't support your assertion that Apple wasn't profiting from the desire for DRM-free music, in fact it undermines it. Both the fact that it costs more to produce DRM'ed music and the fact that Jobs opposes DRM'ed music would support the notion that Apple would profit more from DRM-free music.
So of course he wouldn't sell DRM music for extra if he didn't have to. He wouldn't be so hypocritical as to call for everyone to embrace and request DRM-free music, and then charge extra for DRM-free music.
Huh? There's nothing hypocritical about that. For years, Apple has asserted that their computers are a greater value, and charged more for them. Jobs insists that DRM-free music is a greater value, and that everyone should insist upon having it. What would be at all inconsistent about charging more for a better product?
Re:LOGO - not a viable adult language
on
Forty Years of LOGO
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Your 2 cents ain't worth a dime...;)
It's kinda bizarre that you'd question the efficiency and capability to write "real" programs in it, then go on to invoke BASIC later in the post. In terms of being a fully capable language, BASIC was a toy language compared to LOGO. Pascal was better, at least it had proper procedures and functions, but still not quite as capable (it shared LOGO's heritage of being designed for education, but it lacked much of LOGO's sophistication). Only thing C has over it is a wealth of great, efficient implementations.
(As a historical note, BASIC, at the time 6502 processors were common, lacked proper procedures, functions, structure, scoping, or any of the other stuff you'd associate with non-toy languages. I understand today's BASIC isn't the same, and mean to cast no stones at modern BASIC by this)
That's the problem with most open source software. It's usually 90% of the way there, so it gets hyped as a viable replacement -- but in any program you write, 90% is easy to do, it's that last 10% where the devils hide. So that last 10% never quite makes it into the FOSS solution, it's the kind of difficult thankless boring drudge work programming that you have to pay someone to write, but that last bit is the difference between being able to actually use the product for serious work and almost being able to use the product, if it weren't for that one essential feature you need that it doesn't have. Thus, casual users rave at the free software while professional users expense and buy the proprietary solution.
Why not spend more time and being able to analyze the board better, and mimic the decision making patterns of the masters.
Because that's a waste of time and effort. We already have people who can solve the problem that way: the aforementioned masters. Making an AI that works just like a human brain is pointless -- give me nine months and a cooperative woman to help, and I can create one for you, no advanced technology required. It's the oldest trick in the book. What makes computers valuable is that they do things differently.
The goal of useful AI research is not to replicate human capabilities -- absolutely no point in that. Useful research is into ways to do it different, and in particular, to do it better. One of the failings of HI is that, lacking the capabilities of doing a more exhaustive analysis, it can overlook possibilities. We want to make AI not waste time, but we don't want to lose it's ability to do the things it does better than we do in the process. An AI should always do as exhaustive a search as it can in the time allowed, but intelligently determine the most promising directions for search. Which is what this is all about.
I do imagine that -- every time I read a Wikipedia entry, I keep in mind that there's a thousand Cliff Clavens out there adding their pearls of wisdom to a thousand entries while I read. There are, of course, real experts coming along and cleaning up some of these entries, but I imagine there's a dozen Cliffs for everyone one of them.
Um, yes, all the way back in HTML 1.0 -- any amount of contiguous whitespace characters is to be treated as a single space. If you want two spaces after a period, you have to trick it by making one of them an nbsp. Which you can do, but it's a pain to type after every sentence.
Well, it should be noted that you can mistaken in calling a crow a raven, but you can never be mistaken in calling a raven a crow, just like you can be incorrect in calling a cat a tiger, but you're never incorrect calling a tiger a cat. (Ravens are the largest members of the crow family, i.e. the largest of crows, just as tigers are the largest of cats.) If you're unsure, just call it a crow and you'll be right, just not as specific as you could have been.
Another, more believable theory notes that the story was probably made up during the Babylonian Captivity about how the Jews had once before been enslaved but were eventually freed by the grace of God. It makes for a great tale to give hope to a displaced and enslaved people.
I was wondering how one observation of one very short-lived event, from One set of sensors qualified as indicating anything. But I'm not an astronomer. In any other field it wouldn't be anything more than a "that's interesting, lets look and see if it occurs anywhere else..", I'd think.
Yes, and that's exactly what's happening here. One person observed it. Now they've reported it. Others will now look and see if the observation can be repeated. That's how science works.
If you don't want to read about it in progress, just the end results, avoid reading anything but textbooks.
That estimate is based on it being one of the things they think it may be. It's true that they don't know what it is, but that doesn't me they have no idea what it is.
Your argument seems to be something like, race cars are built for speed, so even though a modified car can go as fast it is worthless because race cars exist.
Manager: Okay, I need the B car, we need to do some off-road work.
Mechanic: Uh, okay, you can take the B car, but you might not to be able to drive it everywhere you could before. We've made some modifications to make is go as fast as the A car.
Manager: Oh dear, is the A car broken?
Mechanic: Hmm? No, the A car works fine. But I noted that if we made these modifications to the B car, it would go just as fast as the A car! Nifty, eh?
Manager: But now it doesn't do the job we originally created it for as well as it did!
Mechanic: But look! You can race with it now! A lot of people were kinda racing around in it anyway, so we figured we better modify it to be a racer just like the A car.
Manager: Did you consider just telling people who want to race to use the A car? It's meant to be a race car, after all.
Mechanic: Yes, but you're missing the point! With just these modifications, B became just as good as racer as A! Why not make B a racer if it can do the job just as well as A, once the modifications are made?
Manager:...
Manager: Okay... well, I need an off-road vehicle now, and with these modifications, B no longer does the job as well. What would you suggest I do?
Mechanic: Hmm. Tricky. Wait, I know. Get the C car out.
Manager: Isn't that the one we designed for fuel economy?
Mechanic: Yes, but once I make these modifications here, it'll be just as good an off-road vehicle as B once was before we turned it into a racer!
Manager: Okay... and what will we do when we need an economy car?
Mechanic: Hmm. Oh, I know! If we take the A car and make these modifications, it'll be a wonderful economy car. Of course, it won't go as fast...
Manager:...
Manager: You're fired.
Indeed. Much of the US would still be without power and telephone service today if it hadn't been for actions taken by the federal government. There was simply no economically viable way for private sector companies to provide such service to any place other than dense, urban areas. But as such services became more and more necessary to our way of life, those areas that didn't get it would become less and less viable as places for further development. For a government with an interest in seeing a flourishing of the country and economy, it made sense to get everyone wired in, so we subsidized heavily the process of deploying these networks. And viewed in terms of what we put in vs. the eventual tax revenue on a more robust economy, it more than paid for itself. But it required a massive public investment and a multi-decade long view to realize this. It's much like the interstate highway system. The amount of economic activity that it enables and encourages benefits everyone and almost certainly more than pays for itself, but it's really hard to quantify.
I'm skeptical about whether the Internet falls into this same category, but I do have to object to the GP's historically naive assertion an entirely private-sector approach "works" for electricity. It didn't, and it's an excellent example of how government can be a catalyst for further development that ultimately benefits us all, if it does it right. TFA is an example of how it can do it wrong...
No, that sounds about right. For some reason, nothing ever works quite right in my dreams. Any piece of tech, from computers to cars to iPods to airplanes, seems to do something quirky and wrong in my draems, usually in front of others while I try desperately to cover up for the fact and pretend everything it normal.:|
Your final price is still $350 for a remarkably underpowered laptop.
No, your final price is $350 for two laptops, one of which is given to someone else. Or is it your contention that because you never see it, it doesn't exist, or maybe it does exist, but no one actually paid for it (and therefore all your money went for the one you saw)? Sorry, just trying to find some charitable meaning in would otherwise be a statement that's just plain factually wrong.
No, asking someone to know the different districts in the UK is like asking someone to know the different counties in Minnesota (some of which are larger than some European nations). Knowing which states are part of the United States is like knowing with nations are part of the European Union, with the exception that, again, most of them are larger than almost all European nations. Some of them have even been completely independent sovereign nations in the past. As have some U.S. states.;)
Ah, but we don't do it on the same scale, therefore, that makes us the good guys, right?
Expecting the good guys to not do bad things is too high a standard. You get to be one of the good guys for just not doing it as much. It's a relative thing -- being the lesser evil makes you good and righteous.;)
You and LL. LL is being forced to make a lot of decisions they really don't want to be in the business of making. At heart, they're a specialized hosting company, and that's really all they want to be. Instead, they're being put into the position of making policies about things they really don't want to deal with, get in the middle of disputes that, as far as they're concerned, don't concern them, etc. No one will be happier than LL to get all that crap out of their hands. Which is, of course, why they're doing this.
Yes, and throwing more hardware at the problem won't fix the bugs that that script depends on. GP was right, you are wrong. Until those bugs are fixed, you'll still be able to bring down your recommended system with a script, and once those bugs are fixed, you won't be able to bring down any sim with it, not even the OpenSpaces ones.
I would hope it would be patently obvious to you and everyone else that what you've said above is false. Are there screenshots and quotes from the game? Yes. Does this constitute "the vast majority" of the content? Please, not even close. The vast majority of the content on GuildWiki comes from the contributors themselves.
Good link. For those who don't want to wade through the whole thing looking for the juicy bits, here's the tender morsel of goodness:
Under Act, subsection 80(1), the downloading of a song for a person's private use does not constitute infringement. There was here no evidence that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's extremely hard to figure out how what you just said could possibly happen. If it was a ternary system, that means the three stars were in stable orbits. One forms a black hole. If no mass were lost, everything would remain in the same stable orbits. If mass were lost (which is almost certainly the case -- supernovas tend to throw off a lot of mass), then the star that becomes a black hole now has *less* grip on its companions than it did. If it doesn't lose them entirely, they should at least shift into more distant orbits. When a star becomes a black hole, it becomes much LESS likely to gobble up its neighbors. If it didn't gobble them up before it collapsed into a black hole, it almost certainly isn't going to do so afterwards.
You mean it isn't necessarily undemocratic. It all depends on how the rule is used.
I do.
That's false. People were paying more money for the same music. If, as you indicate below, having DRM increases costs, then people were paying more money for something that was cheaper to produce. Either Apple was profiting from people's desires for DRM-free music, or Jobs lied about DRM increasing costs.
This is true, but doesn't support your assertion that Apple wasn't profiting from the desire for DRM-free music, in fact it undermines it. Both the fact that it costs more to produce DRM'ed music and the fact that Jobs opposes DRM'ed music would support the notion that Apple would profit more from DRM-free music.
Huh? There's nothing hypocritical about that. For years, Apple has asserted that their computers are a greater value, and charged more for them. Jobs insists that DRM-free music is a greater value, and that everyone should insist upon having it. What would be at all inconsistent about charging more for a better product?
Your 2 cents ain't worth a dime... ;)
It's kinda bizarre that you'd question the efficiency and capability to write "real" programs in it, then go on to invoke BASIC later in the post. In terms of being a fully capable language, BASIC was a toy language compared to LOGO. Pascal was better, at least it had proper procedures and functions, but still not quite as capable (it shared LOGO's heritage of being designed for education, but it lacked much of LOGO's sophistication). Only thing C has over it is a wealth of great, efficient implementations.
(As a historical note, BASIC, at the time 6502 processors were common, lacked proper procedures, functions, structure, scoping, or any of the other stuff you'd associate with non-toy languages. I understand today's BASIC isn't the same, and mean to cast no stones at modern BASIC by this)
That's the problem with most open source software. It's usually 90% of the way there, so it gets hyped as a viable replacement -- but in any program you write, 90% is easy to do, it's that last 10% where the devils hide. So that last 10% never quite makes it into the FOSS solution, it's the kind of difficult thankless boring drudge work programming that you have to pay someone to write, but that last bit is the difference between being able to actually use the product for serious work and almost being able to use the product, if it weren't for that one essential feature you need that it doesn't have. Thus, casual users rave at the free software while professional users expense and buy the proprietary solution.
Because that's a waste of time and effort. We already have people who can solve the problem that way: the aforementioned masters. Making an AI that works just like a human brain is pointless -- give me nine months and a cooperative woman to help, and I can create one for you, no advanced technology required. It's the oldest trick in the book. What makes computers valuable is that they do things differently.
The goal of useful AI research is not to replicate human capabilities -- absolutely no point in that. Useful research is into ways to do it different, and in particular, to do it better. One of the failings of HI is that, lacking the capabilities of doing a more exhaustive analysis, it can overlook possibilities. We want to make AI not waste time, but we don't want to lose it's ability to do the things it does better than we do in the process. An AI should always do as exhaustive a search as it can in the time allowed, but intelligently determine the most promising directions for search. Which is what this is all about.
I do imagine that -- every time I read a Wikipedia entry, I keep in mind that there's a thousand Cliff Clavens out there adding their pearls of wisdom to a thousand entries while I read. There are, of course, real experts coming along and cleaning up some of these entries, but I imagine there's a dozen Cliffs for everyone one of them.
Um, yes, all the way back in HTML 1.0 -- any amount of contiguous whitespace characters is to be treated as a single space. If you want two spaces after a period, you have to trick it by making one of them an nbsp. Which you can do, but it's a pain to type after every sentence.
Well, it should be noted that you can mistaken in calling a crow a raven, but you can never be mistaken in calling a raven a crow, just like you can be incorrect in calling a cat a tiger, but you're never incorrect calling a tiger a cat. (Ravens are the largest members of the crow family, i.e. the largest of crows, just as tigers are the largest of cats.) If you're unsure, just call it a crow and you'll be right, just not as specific as you could have been.
Another, more believable theory notes that the story was probably made up during the Babylonian Captivity about how the Jews had once before been enslaved but were eventually freed by the grace of God. It makes for a great tale to give hope to a displaced and enslaved people.
Nope. Just a conspiracy of cartographers.
Yes, and that's exactly what's happening here. One person observed it. Now they've reported it. Others will now look and see if the observation can be repeated. That's how science works.
If you don't want to read about it in progress, just the end results, avoid reading anything but textbooks.
That estimate is based on it being one of the things they think it may be. It's true that they don't know what it is, but that doesn't me they have no idea what it is.
Manager: Okay, I need the B car, we need to do some off-road work. ... ...
Mechanic: Uh, okay, you can take the B car, but you might not to be able to drive it everywhere you could before. We've made some modifications to make is go as fast as the A car.
Manager: Oh dear, is the A car broken?
Mechanic: Hmm? No, the A car works fine. But I noted that if we made these modifications to the B car, it would go just as fast as the A car! Nifty, eh?
Manager: But now it doesn't do the job we originally created it for as well as it did!
Mechanic: But look! You can race with it now! A lot of people were kinda racing around in it anyway, so we figured we better modify it to be a racer just like the A car.
Manager: Did you consider just telling people who want to race to use the A car? It's meant to be a race car, after all.
Mechanic: Yes, but you're missing the point! With just these modifications, B became just as good as racer as A! Why not make B a racer if it can do the job just as well as A, once the modifications are made?
Manager:
Manager: Okay... well, I need an off-road vehicle now, and with these modifications, B no longer does the job as well. What would you suggest I do?
Mechanic: Hmm. Tricky. Wait, I know. Get the C car out.
Manager: Isn't that the one we designed for fuel economy?
Mechanic: Yes, but once I make these modifications here, it'll be just as good an off-road vehicle as B once was before we turned it into a racer!
Manager: Okay... and what will we do when we need an economy car?
Mechanic: Hmm. Oh, I know! If we take the A car and make these modifications, it'll be a wonderful economy car. Of course, it won't go as fast...
Manager:
Manager: You're fired.
Indeed. Much of the US would still be without power and telephone service today if it hadn't been for actions taken by the federal government. There was simply no economically viable way for private sector companies to provide such service to any place other than dense, urban areas. But as such services became more and more necessary to our way of life, those areas that didn't get it would become less and less viable as places for further development. For a government with an interest in seeing a flourishing of the country and economy, it made sense to get everyone wired in, so we subsidized heavily the process of deploying these networks. And viewed in terms of what we put in vs. the eventual tax revenue on a more robust economy, it more than paid for itself. But it required a massive public investment and a multi-decade long view to realize this. It's much like the interstate highway system. The amount of economic activity that it enables and encourages benefits everyone and almost certainly more than pays for itself, but it's really hard to quantify.
I'm skeptical about whether the Internet falls into this same category, but I do have to object to the GP's historically naive assertion an entirely private-sector approach "works" for electricity. It didn't, and it's an excellent example of how government can be a catalyst for further development that ultimately benefits us all, if it does it right. TFA is an example of how it can do it wrong...
No, that sounds about right. For some reason, nothing ever works quite right in my dreams. Any piece of tech, from computers to cars to iPods to airplanes, seems to do something quirky and wrong in my draems, usually in front of others while I try desperately to cover up for the fact and pretend everything it normal. :|
No, your final price is $350 for two laptops, one of which is given to someone else. Or is it your contention that because you never see it, it doesn't exist, or maybe it does exist, but no one actually paid for it (and therefore all your money went for the one you saw)? Sorry, just trying to find some charitable meaning in would otherwise be a statement that's just plain factually wrong.
No, asking someone to know the different districts in the UK is like asking someone to know the different counties in Minnesota (some of which are larger than some European nations). Knowing which states are part of the United States is like knowing with nations are part of the European Union, with the exception that, again, most of them are larger than almost all European nations. Some of them have even been completely independent sovereign nations in the past. As have some U.S. states. ;)
Ah, but we don't do it on the same scale, therefore, that makes us the good guys, right?
Expecting the good guys to not do bad things is too high a standard. You get to be one of the good guys for just not doing it as much. It's a relative thing -- being the lesser evil makes you good and righteous. ;)
More or less. Second Life is graphical IRC... with shopping malls. ;)
Oh, almost forgot: YARR!
You and LL. LL is being forced to make a lot of decisions they really don't want to be in the business of making. At heart, they're a specialized hosting company, and that's really all they want to be. Instead, they're being put into the position of making policies about things they really don't want to deal with, get in the middle of disputes that, as far as they're concerned, don't concern them, etc. No one will be happier than LL to get all that crap out of their hands. Which is, of course, why they're doing this.
Yes, and throwing more hardware at the problem won't fix the bugs that that script depends on. GP was right, you are wrong. Until those bugs are fixed, you'll still be able to bring down your recommended system with a script, and once those bugs are fixed, you won't be able to bring down any sim with it, not even the OpenSpaces ones.
:o
Have you? Let's take a look at a typical page from GuildWiki:
Grand Court of Sebelkeh (Mission)
I would hope it would be patently obvious to you and everyone else that what you've said above is false. Are there screenshots and quotes from the game? Yes. Does this constitute "the vast majority" of the content? Please, not even close. The vast majority of the content on GuildWiki comes from the contributors themselves.
Good link. For those who don't want to wade through the whole thing looking for the juicy bits, here's the tender morsel of goodness:
Mmm mmm good...